A Political Pilgrim in Europe

In these days everybody is writing his memories. Disappointed politicians decline to be forgotten. Successful and unsuccessful generals refuse to be neglected. People of all sorts and conditions insist on being heard. The most intimate affairs of a life are laid bare in order to arrest public attention. Intolerable to most is the fear that the world will go past him. Nobody will willingly let himself die. This is the conclusion to which one is driven by the publication during the last two years of a vast mass of autobiography.

I am writing my own memoirs—two years of them. It never would have occurred to me unaided that they could be of the slightest interest to anybody. Friends have listened to my stories with interest, and public meetings on several occasions have, by their silence and attention during the telling, shown a certain pleasure in their recital; but only the insistence of a valued few has induced me to put some of them into a book.

These are not the most interesting experiences of my life. The four years of the war could reveal much more, and better, if it were possible to write about those times. I doubt if I could—fully. The big experiences of life are seldom even spoken about, much less put down in black and white. Things happened during the war which are as sacred as the birth of a child or the death of a lover.

The twelve years of agitation for woman suffrage, during which time I addressed more than two hundred public meetings a year in as many different towns, were packed full of incident, grave and gay, which a little quiet thought might dig out of the recesses of the mind. They were gallant days, full of fine friendships.


But these stories of my wanderings in Europe since the Armistice, with no other purpose in view than to do what one person might do, or at least attempt, to restore good feeling between the nations and the normal course of life as quickly as possible, will interest chiefly those who understood, and those honest folk who wondered at, the position which a few of us adopted during the war.

Those who have been brought up to believe, as I was, that war is alien to the spirit and teaching of Christianity, will scarcely blame me for taking that teaching literally. I believed with all the intensity of conviction that evil could not be wholly destroyed by evil. The application of this belief to war was clear: Militarism could not be destroyed by militarism even though the princes of this world declared that it could.

I had read enough history to prove to myself the mad folly of wars. All of which never clouded my apprehension of the fact that war may be an evil and yet, by reason of vicious policies and pledges over a number of years, become the lesser evil of two wrongs in the eyes of many wise and good men and women. To choose between the evil and the good is simple. To decide which of two evil things is the lesser evil is anything but simple. I believed myself to be intensely right. This never meant that the other person was necessarily wrong. I never tried to influence by so much as a hair’s breadth the judgment of the young man called upon to fight. What he did was his business, not mine. If pure-motived, he was entirely honourable whether he chose prison or the front.